Farmers’ markets gaining popularity

By Michael Zimmerman

They were a com­mon sight in the United States before the Indus­trial Age: farm­ers’ mar­kets. Then, the direct farmer-to-consumer rela­tion­ship was filled with the mid­dle­man of gro­cery stores and supermarkets.

Today, super­mar­kets encom­pass many things like clothes, DVDs, cloth­ing sup­plies, and med­i­cine. Many local farm­ers’ mar­kets went by the way­side. Some out­door mar­kets stood the test of time, such as Cincinnati’s Find­lay Mar­ket, Seattle’s Pike Place Mar­ket, and the aptly-named Farm­ers’ Mar­ket in Los Ange­les, but largely the idea of farm­ers sell­ing directly to con­sumers was gone.

How­ever, the idea of farm­ers’ mar­kets has become more pop­u­lar in recent decades due to increased demand for fresh, locally-grown foods and an increase in pop­u­lar­ity of organ­i­cally grown foods.

Pre­ble County lays claim to two such farm­ers’ mar­kets. West Alexandria’s Cel­e­bra­tion Com­mit­tee is in the sec­ond year of its farm­ers’ mar­ket, which is from 5–7 p.m. at Peace Park in the vil­lage every Thurs­day evening from May through Sep­tem­ber. Eaton’s farm­ers’ mar­ket is from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. every Sat­ur­day from May through September.

In today’s world, peo­ple gen­er­ally buy pro­duce from a cor­ner of dis­play cases with auto­matic water­ers or wrapped in cel­lo­phane. Those fruits and veg­eta­bles are tossed into a metal cage on wheels and run across a con­veyor belt before being taken home. Farm­ers’ mar­kets offer a dif­fer­ent, and some say, more per­sonal way to pur­chase fruits, veg­eta­bles, baked goods, and any num­ber of other prod­ucts. Both Eaton and West Alexan­dria fea­ture a booth of grass-fed beef, blan­kets, plas­tic con­tain­ers. You’ll find a lot more that just fruits and veg­eta­bles at these local mar­kets. Most impor­tantly, you’ll find the abil­ity to inter­act with the peo­ple who are actu­ally grow­ing the food you’re pur­chas­ing. To speak to the peo­ple grow­ing the pro­duce at the super­mar­ket, you’d have to buy a plane ticket. The fact that the food is locally-grown affects the taste, accord­ing to Eaton’s farm­ers’ mar­ket man­ager Char­lie Cressell.

“Num­ber one with farm­ers’ mar­kets is most of your pro­duce is grown locally,” he said. “On aver­age, in the super­mar­kets, it trav­els 1,500 miles. You get mel­ons from down south. You don’t get them from around here. And espe­cially in the win­ter­time, what it’s done is it’s trav­eled 1,500 miles. What they’ve done is, they’ve grown mel­ons or toma­toes or what­ever pro­duce for sus­tain­abil­ity in ship­ping. Not for taste. That’s why, if you taste a tomato in the win­ter­time, the skin is so thick. There’s hardly any taste to the tomato. There’s hardly any taste to the melon. They’ve grown it for ship-ability, not for taste. At the farm­ers mar­ket, most of this local pro­duce is grown for taste, and it tastes two times bet­ter. It’s like grow­ing in your own garden.”

The phys­i­cal inter­ac­tion with peo­ple is what makes farm­ers’ mar­kets a spe­cial expe­ri­ence, rather than load­ing a cart with bags and boxes and fil­ing out through a check­out line. “I think it’s brought com­mu­nity spirit a lit­tle bit,” said West Alexan­dria farm­ers’ mar­ket orga­nizer Deb Smith. “Peo­ple do come out. Peo­ple can’t wait to get here and get Cheryl’s apple dumplings on Thurs­day night. She’s com­ing up with sugar-free pies. There’s nor­mally a Tup­per­ware lady here. There are a lot of dif­fer­ent things, and a lot of peo­ple come down just to hang out, talk with us, talk with the vendors.”

“Peo­ple like com­ing here,” Cres­sell said. “It’s not just buy­ing. It’s also a social event. If you sit and watch, you’ll see a lot of peo­ple come up here just to see each other. That’s the rea­son why I like it so well.”

Accord­ing to Cres­sell, the whole idea behind farm­ers’ mar­kets is a micro­cosm of the spirit of the United States.

“The thing about a farm­ers mar­ket is the ven­dors and the cus­tomers are face-to-face, and they get to know that ven­dor like a friend,” he said.

“I’ve got peo­ple that know me by my first name, and they talk to me just like I see them every day. The one thing I love about it is the peo­ple, because I’m a peo­ple per­son. Even if I only had toma­toes to sell, I would make sure I was here every Sat­ur­day, because of the inter­ac­tion with peo­ple. It’s the truest form of what the found­ing fathers envi­sioned for Amer­ica. Obama, like every pres­i­dent before him, always talks about com­mu­nity, and this is the purest form of it right here. Peo­ple come to the farm­ers mar­ket, inter­min­gle with the ven­dors, inter­min­gle amongst them­selves. It’s, to me, it’s what Amer­ica is. It’s small-town peo­ple, peo­ple from all walks of life. There’s gay peo­ple, peo­ple of dif­fer­ent races, reli­gions, all dif­fer­ent peo­ple, and they inter­min­gle, and there’s no junk going on.”

Cres­sell farms six acres on Pre­ble County Line Road near Brookville, Ohio, and he farms all six acres organ­i­cally. Although he’s only been sell­ing at the Eaton farm­ers’ mar­ket for four years, he’s been farm­ing organ­i­cally for 40 years, and he learned every­thing from his grand­fa­ther. “My grand­fa­ther taught me from way back,” Cres­sell said. “On his own prop­erty, he never used any chem­i­cal fer­til­izer. He had five dif­fer­ent fruit trees, apple trees. On each tree, he grafted five dif­fer­ent types of apples, and on five trees, he had five dif­fer­ent types of apples. He was amaz­ing. I was amazed by what my grand­fa­ther did. He took the time to teach me how he did things.”

Organic farm­ing used to be called just “farm­ing,” until after World War II, accord­ing to Cres­sell. That was when farm­ers began using chem­i­cals to farm, and what’s known today as “organic farm­ing” disappeared.

“Chem­i­cal farm­ers use chem­i­cals like sodium chlo­ride, man-made fer­til­iz­ers, which started back in World War II. That’s when they had all these chem­i­cals they used for muni­tions, and when the war was over, they didn’t know what to do with them. Well, they started exper­i­ment­ing with them, and found out they were good fer­til­iz­ers. That started the rev­o­lu­tion of chem­i­cal farm­ing, and we did not know the long-term con­se­quences of using it until now. The last few years, they’re start­ing to find out a lot of our can­cers, a lot of even some men­tal insta­bil­ity, things like that, are related to chem­i­cals that you eat in your food. Chem­i­cals you put on your lawn are very dangerous.”

Cres­sell said organic farm­ing, in addi­tion to not using man-made chem­i­cals, is a more hands-on type of farm­ing, and it is less harm­ful to the soil than chem­i­cal farm­ing. Organic farm­ing brings back old ideas such as crop rota­tion, which Cres­sell says is bet­ter than feed­ing crops with chemicals.

“They went away from the farm­ing prac­tice of rotat­ing,” he said. “A lot of organ­ics is rotat­ing your veg­eta­bles so the pest doesn’t know that the plant isn’t there any­more and it dies. That’s how you com­bat pests a lot. I don’t plant toma­toes in the same spot for five years. I don’t plant any of my veg­eta­bles in the same spot they’ve grown for five years. When (pests) come up in the warm months, and the plant isn’t there, they die.”

He con­tin­ued: “I used to not say too much about the con­ven­tional farm­ers, but I’ve seen what’s going on with the soil the more I’ve inves­ti­gated around. Every farmer I talk to says, ‘Well, I can’t farm that way.’ I have stats that shows you farms out west that grow corn and soy­beans and wheat the organic way, and the yields are bet­ter. That’s not been nec­es­sar­ily true for a long time, but organ­ics has taken a big step in research, and they’ve found ways organ­i­cally to grow things. The thing about it is you’re replen­ish­ing the soil when you grow organic. Instead of using the soil, you’re build­ing the soil. That is a resource you can’t waste is soil.”

Organic farm­ing and farm­ers’ mar­kets go hand-in-hand. Both are con­sid­ered “old-fashioned,” and to those involved, organic farm­ing and farm­ers’ mar­kets are the bet­ter way to go. If the num­ber of ven­dors and patrons are any indi­ca­tion, an increas­ing num­ber of peo­ple share that view.

“Last year, we prob­a­bly had seven to 10 ven­dors,” Smith said. “We’ve got 22 reg­is­tered ven­dors this year. We charged $20 for the whole year this year, and that was to go to our Fourth of July fire­works, which is the first year the vil­lage has had fire­works on Fourth of July in 43 years.

“We have a lot of peo­ple come through. There are peo­ple who stay and min­gle, but we also have peo­ple that just pull up on Route 35. They’ll park, get out, get what they need, get back in, and go. We’ve added some enter­tain­ment this year, and we’ve had some peo­ple hang­ing around a lit­tle bit more. I had a cus­tomer at the garage that told me, ‘We live in Brookville, but we’re here every Thurs­day for the farm­ers’ market.’”

Shop­ping locally at farm­ers’ mar­kets is an increas­ingly pop­u­lar trend, and for those inter­ested in the idea, there’s still a few more months to check out Pre­ble County’s markets.

Posted by Acres Admin on Aug 7 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.